Don G, continued

 

Another unnnnh day.  I go, and take Peter, whether he wants to or not, to Tabitha, my Bowen-massage* lady, once a month.  Today was that day.  Hellhounds and I had a lovely hurtle while she was unhinging Peter—she lives on the edge of a village on the far side of Mauncester, so in bad weather you can turn right and walk on pavement, and in good weather you can turn left and hurtle across countryside—and then it was my turn.   Between SHADOWS and the exigencies of doodling** I have no brain left and my limbs are like rubber . . . but I can turn my head without screaming as white-hot pain lances up through my trapezius and bores through my skull, which is an improvement on the last ten days or so.***  Sigh.  When I get this post done† I'm going to find out if any of this has loosened my throat any. 

glanalaw

And then Nadia made me sing leaning—lightly, but leaning—against the door. And my voice just frelling opened.

My teacher makes me do this, too. As she explains it, this helps your body get back into its proper alignment, not the posture which we *think* is correct (which usually ends up having a lot of tension because we try to hold head or shoulders or whatever into a certain position). It is amazing what a difference standing against a door can make to your voice!

I don't have a door†† convenient to the piano—I will have to give myself my note and then rush across the room to lean against the kitchen door which may be just the tiniest bit counterproductive. . . .  But what you say certainly sounds right.  I think about 90% of what Nadia does with me is about lowering various inappropriate tension levels.  She's also a rider, so she uses a lot of dressage metaphors because she knows I'll understand them.  If you set your horse up well enough, it can only do what you want it to do.  I don't have a lot of voice to let free of its bondage, but I do feel a bit sorry for it, a twelve-hand pony trying to drag a 5000-pound double-Clydesdale sledge.  Here, have a carrot.

Also, I think I need to come up with a creative internet name for my voice teacher. She is good enough to deserve one! 

Definitely.  And any time you want to write a guest post about singing, doooooo feel free.

blondviolinist

Because I can't resist, here's an English translation of the Frauenliebe und -leben poems. Whatever the last poem says about a woman's life practically ending when her husband dies, Clara Schumann had quite an active and productive life after Robert died, thank you very much.  

Yes.  The more I know about Robert the less I like him.  COGNITIVE DISSONANCE.  He was married to Clara and he wrote this awful twaddle?  Can we say 'masculine insecurity'?   Can we say 'fool of a man'?  I keep trying to remind myself that it was different then and that even today if two first-rate musicians were married to each other and one of them had to drop out due to injury, it would be very hard on whichever one it was, and in the second half of the nineteenth century it was very hard on the husband—he would have been within his 'rights' to demand she stay at home and stick to cooking and cleaning and raising their forty-two children.  She both performed and composed a lot less than she might have if she didn't have (eight) children to look after while the great man composed.  And while it is a very sad and painful and depressing story I don't have a lot of sympathy for someone who (probably) went mad and died of syphilis.  You don't get syphilis by staying at home and sublimating. 

            Don't get me started on that nasty little creep Brahms. . . . ††† 

AnguaLupin

I agree completely that the portrayal of Giovanni as a total prick is much better than the portrayal of Giovanni as "one of those lads"; Kwiecien managed to pull off strangely seductive pond scum with flair. The ending, I thought, was brilliant — when the Met pulls someone down into hell, they don't mess around. You were left with the feeling that Giovanni actually was !@#&ed, which isn't usual. Normally it's more like, "oh, Giovanni ended up in hell, I guess Mozart had to make it a morality play in the end". Not this time. Giovanni got his comeuppance. 

I assume all you opera goers know that there's been a fashion for leaving off the final scene/chorus, where the rest of the characters rush back on stage and (effectively) shake their fingers at the audience and say 'this is what happens if you're a bad guy'?   I can no longer remember this for sure, but I think it was the first Giovanni I ever saw that cut the ending and it felt totally wrong and unfinished—although since I'd grown up with recordings of the whole thing I may have just been doing a Pavlov's dog.  Still.  I think messing with Mozart is stupid—and unbelievably arrogant.  You think you know better than Mozart?  What?  Although it may not have been till I saw it with the proper ending—I mean saw rather than heard only on a recording—that the penny dropped for me.  That last chorus to me isn't about turning it into a morality play—it's about the fact that nothing has changed.  Giovanni is in hell, where he belongs, but Elvira is still nuts, Zerlina is still married to a thug, and Anna is still disdaining Ottavio (and the Commendatore is still dead).  This suddenly—I emphasise this is only my reaction—makes the entire opera more psychologically interesting. 

Diane in MN

What's interesting about the plot, though, is that D.G. is a pretty unsuccessful seducer in the course of this opera. Not that this affects his opinion of himself. 

Speaking of the variety of responses that one work of art may arouse in its audience, this fascinates me.  I take his seductiveness as a given—I see no reason not to believe Leporello's little black book, and Giovanni spends the opera being followed around by two of his conquests—not, one feels, because he's destroyed them or their reputations (Ottavio desperately wants to marry Anna, and Elivira seems able to please herself) but because they can't help themselves.  The only reason he fails with Zerlina is because Elvira appears inopportunely—and he seems to be planning to do his dozen peasant girls just before the Commendatore gets in the way.  I could see this however as presaging the arrival of doom:  is the Commendatore the first angry father he's killed?  And is Elvira the first spurned lover who's caught up with him and upset his fun? 

Caryn

Ah. Mariusz. (swoon)

http://www.mariuszkwiecien.com/ (but it's Flash)  

Thank you.  I don't know why I couldn't get this to come up the other night.  Let's blame it on my faltering broadband.

            I'm intrigued by how much of his charm is (to me anyway) only apparent in motion.  None of these still photos—I admit I did not trawl the entire site—does him anything like justice.  You want to see/hear him in action. 

PamAdams

Hmmm…. Looks like my local amateur opera company isn't doing Don Giovanni until Spring- Don Pasquale is next up. 

Oh, yerp.  Are you sure you want to see an amateur production of Don Giovanni?  Don Pasquale, maybe, if they have someone who can pull off Pasquale, but DG is asking an awful lot out of a bunch of amateurs. 

Glanalaw

I saw Don Giovanni in Nashville a few years ago… it was a fabulous production, with good characterization, great sets, period costume, etc — up until the final moments, when they had Giovanni stroll back on stage in a white suit and shades with a blonde on each arm, as if he not only had learned nothing, but was in fact getting exactly what he always wanted – lots of women – in the afterlife. This after a very effective dragging-down-to-hell scene. That one director's choice spoiled the whole production for me! I left saying over and over "but why would you DO that?!?"

That director should be shot. 

* * *

* Firebyrd wrote about my DON GIOVANNI post:

I love posts like this, not because I'm glad anyone suffers like this of course, but because it makes me feel like I'm not actually crazy. I rarely go to things like church, even though I'd like to and I sit at home most of the time, but sitting still (especially in a dress) is completely different from what I do at home. If I do go, I come home exhausted, in pain, and usually have to take a nap, even if I've only gone and sat for an hour. I feel like I'm a big baby, but it definitely helps to know I'm not the only one. 

You are not crazy and you are not the only one.  ME/CFS/fibro and the auto-immune-system-gone-wrong maladies are an epidemic.   I don't know enough to guess how much of this is better diagnosis, as doctors are beginning to accept the fact that this is a real constellation of illness and that the epidemic isn't of malingering and laziness, and how much is that there are more cases per x of the population.  But as I said the other night I'm increasingly distressed by the number of emails and a few tweets I receive about how I cope, especially from people who clearly aren't, who haven't got their heads around it, possibly because of the characteristic brain-fog.  I was already old when I went down with it and so already kind of used to the way life is one damn thing after another—I was also married to a sympathetic husband and did not have a nine to five job.  But it was not a good time, the first few years, learning what worked for me, and I still have (*&^%$£"!!!!! spells, but even the spells, after almost a dozen years, are familiar.  I don't really think about coping any more, I just do it—and keep reading about ME and health generally to see if I'm missing anything that might help. 

                  I'm going to do a how-I-cope blog post one day soon, so it's up there.   And—where we came in—one of the ways I cope is by going to see Tabitha.  

** Fiona comes tomorrow so the first instalment will hit the unsuspecting postal system.  I'm sure their agents of destruction will be up for the standard postal deflection techniques, which include meaningless stickers applied to all available surfaces, especially those with addresses on them, and the resultant accumulation of the undeliverable is donated to NASA for experiments in the decay of vegetable-derived materials under semi-void conditions. 

*** Approximately since Darkness did his spectacular projectile-diarrhoea thing.  And he comes off his pills tomorrow.  

† Blah blah blah blah bliggle glig urp gonzo blah 

†† Or a wall.  As previously observed, none of the three houses in this household has a lot of empty wall space. 

††† I should perhaps stipulate that I like a lot of both Robert Schumann's and Brahms' music, and in terms of wonderful human beings, my great hero Verdi was not.